Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Our habits led to flooding of Thika highway

By Lukoye Atwoli
Sunday Nation 18 August 2013

Kenyans who live in Nairobi and think the capital city is the
beginning and end of Kenya were shocked last Wednesday when the flagship
project of our “development”, Thika Road, was rendered impassable due
to heavy flooding.

Pictures posted online showed roads
that seemed to have turned into rivers, complete with submerged
vehicles and people wading in knee-deep water. What
many did not realise was that this phenomenon was not only restricted to
Nairobi and Thika Road. Outside Nairobi, many roads regularly turn into
rivers whenever it rains. The difference is that they are already
hazardous due to the many craters one has to reckon with even on dry
days.

It was, therefore, amusing to see some people
pouring vitriol on the Chinese, who they deemed responsible for the
allegedly “poorly designed roads” that provided proof of inferior
techniques. Unfortunately, the evidence against Chinese builders is very
weak to begin with.

First, one only needs to look at
the roads built by the Chinese in their own country to understand why
their engineering and construction cannot be to blame. Every direction
one looks in China, there are roads more complex than any we have in
this country. Thika Road would approximate the equivalent of a rural
access road in comparison!

Second, the criticism of
Chinese architecture loses its sting when one looks at Kenyan roads
designed and built by Kenyans. They are pockmarked with potholes within
weeks of completion, and the usually thin layer of tarmac is washed away
within days of a drizzle. If Chinese road-builders are pathetic, then
obviously ours are non-existent!

One is, therefore,
justified to ask what went wrong last week leading to the conversion of
this architectural masterpiece (in Kenyan terms, of course!) into a
raging river.

The obvious answer is that there was a
problem with drainage. On Kenyan-built roads, drainage is not an
integral consideration during construction. Our builders only think
about drainage whenever water pools in the craters that inevitably form a
few weeks after “completion”. However, Thika Road was built with
adequate drainage channels, at least in the eyes of a road construction
layman like me.

WE ARE TO BLAME

Unfortunately,
soon after it was opened for use, those of us enjoying the smoothness
of the road continued with our peculiar habits. We buy foodstuffs on our
journeys, and when we are done with them, we throw the wrappers and any
left-overs out of the windows.

Plastic bags, maize cobs, milk cartons,
and banana peels -- nothing is spared in our quest to “clean up” our
personal space. We subscribe to the philosophy that
once something is out of sight (out of the car window in our case), it
no longer exists. And if it does, it is somebody else’s problem.

A
second problem is the lack of a maintenance culture in Kenya. Despite
our uncouth behaviour of throwing all waste out of car windows, had the
responsible authorities been regularly unclogging the drains, the
problem of flooded roads would not arise. In Kenya,
unfortunately, we build things and then sit back to watch them
degenerate. Once this happens, we turn around and look for someone else
to blame.

In this case, we must acknowledge our own
responsibility for our flooded roads and leave the Chinese out of it.
We cannot live first-class lives without developing first-class habits!

Dr Lukoye Atwoli is a consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at Moi University’s School of Medicine lukoye@gmail.com